


The Shortest Way Home

by 2ndA



Series: GK/WWII AU [2]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - World War II, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 21:58:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1873980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Last Brad knew, Nate was pushing papers as a minor intelligence officer in Weisbaden...but it’s barely eight weeks since the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.  The whole continent is a maelstrom of displaced persons and blood-crazed partisans and traumatized civilians—anything might have happened.</p><p>(A sequel to my WWII/GK AU Owed By So Many to So Few)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shortest Way Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thady/gifts).



_War poetry has the subversive tendency to be our age's love poetry._

Brad doesn’t get mail.  This is a tenet of war:  God is on our side, the brass can be worse than the enemy,  and no one ever sends Brad mail.  If his mother writes, and if the letter isn’t mislaid by the censors, blown up with a mail plane, or sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic by the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine, then it’s sent to his original posting in England, maybe forwarded as far as Bassingbourn.  It will never find him here in Germany.  He doesn’t even bother to go to mailcall anymore, but someone in the must have picked up the postcard for him.  (Brad would bet cash money it was the Reporter)

The card is propped on the sorry-ass government-issue excuse for a pillow when he returns from chow.  Brad approaches it as he would an unexploded bomb in a garden, stands next to the rack studying it for a few moments, just observing.  It’s the standard pasteboard field service postcard.  Brad had filled out several when he was in the base hospital at Tangmere, back when he still bothered with mail.  To prevent loose lips from sinking ships, the cards come pre-printed with blanks to fill and choices to circle, like a multiple-guess test back at school.  Touching just the edge, he turns it and…yes, there’s his name and the address of this goddamn, end-of-the-road, goat-fucked alpine-meadow-turned-Allied-camp.  He does not recognize the handwriting

Observation is followed by action: Brad flips the card and skims the message.  Bold red letters across the top remind him that in order to get the postcard through the censors NOTHING IS TO BE WRITTEN EXCEPT THE DATE AND SIGNATURE SENTENCES NOT REQUIRED CAN BE ERASED.  And then the message:

 _Dear_ _BRAD ,  _

_~~1.I am quite well~~ _

_2\. I am {injured} ~~{sick}~~ and am ~~{~~_ ~~being sent back to base}~~ {in military hospital}

 _3\. I {am well_ } ~~{hope to be discharged soon}~~

_4\. Letter to follow at first opportunity._

_Sincerely//_ _ ~~Affectionately~~_ //  _~~With love~~_    

 _SIGNATURE ONLY:_ _ N A  T  E  _

_DATE:_ _ 12 th July 1945  _

Brad scans the letter again, the words blurring together: _I am injured and am in military hospital I am well.  Iaminjuredandaminmilitaryhospital._ He puts his thumb over the childish capitals straggling off the _signature only_ line. They are written in pencil, unlike the neat fountain pen lines that have addressed the card, filled in Brad’s name and the date, struck out the irrelevant lines.  A nurse?  A volunteer? Brad remembers the volunteers who had come to write letters for patients in hospital at Tangmere; the patients who couldn’t write for themselves always dictated relentlessly positive notes because the young ladies writing for them usually had husbands and brothers still serving.  _I am well. Letter to follow at first opportunity.  Sincerely._ Brad wonders how much of the wording is accurate, and how much was Nate lying for the sake of whoever held the fountain pen.  
  
It does occur to him that the military provides a very limited number of choices: there is no way to communicate _I was blinded by an ammo-dump explosion_ , for example, or _My right arm has been amputated at the elbow due to infection,_ or _A bullet has severed the nerves of my spine and I am crippled for life_.

Brad studies the reverse of the card: it was mailed from _Allied Field Hospital No. 2 BERLIN—Soviet Sector_.  Last Brad knew, Nate was pushing papers as a minor intelligence officer in Weisbaden, quietly working out his time before being discharged back to Sussex.  But, of course, when they’d met, Brad had also thought Nate was running his family farm for the British Ministry of Agriculture, rather than, say, secretly training Mediterranean spies for missions in occupied Europe.  It’s been three weeks since he last saw Nate, barely eight weeks since the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.  The whole continent is a maelstrom of displaced persons and blood-crazed partisans and traumatized civilians—anything might have happened.

++++

Brad finds Meesh, the battalion interpreter, smoking black-market cigarettes and watching a column of POWs being moved from one side of the make-shift parade ground to the other.  Knowing Meesh, he’s already traded the prisoners for every worthwhile thing they still own, plus a heap of useless stuff that he’ll somehow turn profitable.  And maybe those cigarettes and a blowjob.

Brad studies the straggling line of scarecrows, gangly teenage limbs in mismatched uniforms. “Jesus Christ, it’s like a Boy Scout Jamboree.”

“They are Panzergrenadier division, _ostkrieg,_ maybe Ukrainian front,”  Meesh says, and Brad figures he can forgive the interpreter for missing the sarcasm since English is his—third language? fourth?

“I meant they look like goddamn high schoolers.”

Meesh blows a perfect smoke ring.  “Well, Nazi High Command made enlistment age to seventeen last year…but of course, all seventeens had already lied about the age to enlist two-three years ago.  So,” he waves at the ragtag group.  “Who is knowing?  They _are_ maybe high school class.”

That is such a fucking depressing thought Brad can’t even be bothered to ask how Meesh learned so much about the German army recruitment patterns.  Instead, he passes Meesh a musette bag.  It contains three cans of Spam, a wad of francs, two British pounds, a slab of PX chocolate, an aviator’s wristwatch, a pair of socks, and a few yards of silk from the ‘chute Trombley wrecked when he landed in a tree.

“Can you get me to Berlin?”

“Ah, Berlin!”  Meesh smiles knowingly.  “Lovely town.  Berlin is lovely town, my friend.”

“Yes,” Brad says slowly.  “And I would like to go there."

“You could maybe just afford train ticket,”  Meesh says, poking through Brad’s collected treasures.  Which means Brad has overpaid him by a factor of at least two, but he’s not in a position to bargain.

“I thought we’d blown up all their train lines.”

“Only most of them, and in the west. The Ruhr.  Bremerhaven. Your noble British allies have been rebuilding with much enthusiasms.  They are loving the trains, these British.”

“They’re _our_ allies, Meesh,” Brad allows himself a smile.  After all, once he’s in Berlin, how hard could it possibly be to find a field hospital?  “Whose fucking side are you on?”

“Winning side, of course, Sergeant.”  Meesh never calls anyone by their name.  “Always the winning side, me.”

++++

It takes Brad four hours in a Jeep to reach the nearest intact rail head, then another twelve in a train across ravaged countryside to get to Berlin.  His carriage is a Babel of languages: the other passengers are all interpreters, fresh from a British troop transport.  Apparently they are all members of the Pioneer Corps: chased out of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, they had evacuated to Britain.  The English had grudgingly accepted them as second-class soldiers, but now the “enemy aliens” were desired for precisely for what set them apart in the first place:  a native-like grasp of the language and culture of central Europe

Brad sleeps through most of the train trip, since his compatriots in the Jeep had insisted on _singing_ their way to the depot all night.  (“Keeps us awake, buddy!”  the driver had declared between verses of _Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.  “_ Yeah,”  Brad had retorted.  “I’ll bet it does.”) He wakes only once, at a station stop, when one of the Pioneers unwisely squeezes his hand through the train’s louvers to give a chocolate bar to a ragged child on a seemingly empty platform.  Suddenly, the train car is surrounded by a howling hurricane of kids, rapping on the windows, calling to the soldiers in a bastardized blend of German and English.  One little pinched face is right at Brad’s level, a bony hand splayed against the train window like a starved spider

One of the MPs actually has to get off the train and chase the children away before they can pull away.  After that, the interpreters sit in shocked silence.  Brad rolls himself in his overcoat and falls back to sleep.  In his dreams, the hungry child’s fingers pass right through the glass window, like a ghost.  They grab the sleeve of his uniform jacket and shake until he wakes…and they are transformed into the hand of a Pioneer Corps soldier, waking him to say they have arrived, at last, in Berlin.

++++

The station once had a graceful glass roof  over the tracks.  Now there is only a wrought iron shell of empty squares where the glass panes once were, stretching over the sky like the ribs of some prehistoric creature

There is no one to meet Brad at the station, but one of the MPs jots a map on the back of his orders. “No use giving you street names,” the man says, sounding like he just left Brooklyn yesterday, “even if I could pronounce them—the roads're a disaster.  But Information HQ is practically around the corner: used to be a station hotel.  Good luck, buddy.”

Although the large clock on the station façade says it is 9:37 PM, Brad’s watch assures him that it is almost 8:00 in the morning. The city is eerily quiet, once he turns the corner from the station: the Brits are apparently headed to their sector and there is no traffic, motorized or pedestrian, in the American quadrant yet.  Brad follows his map down the long fence around the station yard, past a derelict train shed, around a corner; then he looks up and loses his breath.

On the right side of the street, the whole block of graceful Wilhelmine townhouses look as though they’ve melted: the roof slates have slid over the gutters and down the fire-blacked facades, empty windows knocked crooked, stones and tiles fallen away like missing teeth.  The left side—which must once have been a perfect mirror-image of luxurious, symmetrical domesticity—has simply ceased to exit as anything recognizable,  smashed to bricks and boards by whatever bomb blew out all the glass in the train station.  At the peak of one mountain of rubble, a scrap of fabric flutters from a stick like a flag of surrender—white, patterned with pink splotches: roses, maybe, a curtain, caught on the window frame of what was once a maid’s attic bedroom.

Brad has seen bomb sites—hell, Brad has helped to _create_ bomb sites—but they’ve mostly been on newsreels and in training photographs.  Then, too, they’ve mostly been factories and shipyards spread out along industrial parks.  He hadn’t realized the scale, the sheer _bulk_ of the detritus left behind when you dismantle a half-dozen solid, furnished house with speed and fire.  It's been years since Brad was the smallest person in a room, but walking down an empty boulevard lined with three-story piles of rubble makes him feel tiny and vulnerable, unprotected.  How long since the bombing that preceded the Battle of Berlin...two months?  Three? The morning light is grainy with pulverized mortar carried on a summer breeze that still smells like burning.

The part of his mind that still functions like a warrior, that hasn’t been shocked back to civilian status, recognizes that the bomb must have landed in the southwestern corner of the block, missing the station completely.  The damage is worst here, the building remnants burnt nearly flat.  Through this gap in the destruction, Brad can see into the next street. Several houses, possibly still occupied, are missing whole walls.  Brad can make out a second-floor sitting room, complete with a china cabinet, that now opens right onto the air. His sister had a dollhouse that worked like that, once: Ginny could lift off the whole front and look into the perfect little rooms where imaginary people lived perfect little make-believe lives.

++++

The American Information HQ is two blocks further, facing away from the station and the wreckage.  A cluster of windows have been boarded up, but otherwise it looks like exactly what it is: a mid-range travelers’ hotel, now flying the stars and stripes above its silly baroque cupola.

Brad presents his orders at what used to be hotel reception.  They are received by a small, brash Sergeant Major with an almost impenetrable molasses accent, who shouts at him for five minutes about the extreme disrespect he has shown to the grooming standard by arriving  looking like something th’ goddamn cat drug in from th’ goddamn rain.  Brad stands at strict parade attention until the man finally sputters to a halt.  “PAPPY!”  he shouts at last, “Ruuu-dy!"

Two men appear behind Brad’s shoulder.  Brad almost jumps; their sudden, silent arrival is threatening in a way that Sergeant Major just isn’t

“Gentlemen,  would you two look, just _look_ at this de-plorable excuse for military discipline and tell me _this_ is how we’re goin’ta win th’ goddam war against th’ goddamn Japanese!  Lord Ahmighty, it's a deeeesgrace.”  Before either man can even open his mouth, the Sergeant Major has pounded at Brad’s orders with a rubber stamp and flounced off with a huff, muttering disgustedly.

It takes a moment for the quiet to return.  It is only when Brad can hear the rattle-tap of a typewriter elsewhere in the building that Rudy finally speaks.

“Don’t mind Sixta, sir.”

“S’right,”  says the other man—Pappy.  “He thinks Army discipline has been going downhill since the Battle of Shiloh, and that fussing about it will raise morale.”

“Which gives him the right to talk to me like a five-year-old idiot?”  Brad seethes.  It is probably unwise to bitch first thing at a new posting, but Brad has _not_ just traveled for the better part of 20 hours to get reamed out like a brand-new, green-ass recruit.  That vague sense of vulnerability he'd felt in the street is beginning to chill into the icy, empty stillness that Brad usually associates with completing the takeoff checklist before a bombing run. It usually means that something is going to be destroyed.

“Did you walk from the station?”  If Rudy is rattled by Sixta’s early morning outburst or Brad’s quiet fury, you wouldn’t know it from his sympathetic tone.  “That’s a difficult road, my brother.”

Brad is about to snap: he is _not_ Rudy’s brother, and he didn’t come here to talk about the fucking scenery—that didn’t even…that’s not why he’s upset.  Not that he’s upset.  Offended, maybe.  Offended by the insult to his warrior spirit.  After all, why would a couple of broken old houses upset him? But by the time he can put words to the thoughts, Rudy is leading him out past the reception desk and up the hotel’s central staircase to a quiet room with a balcony. Pappy vanishes as quickly as he'd arrived.

Rudy lights a spirit lamp and finds a tin mess cup on a shelf.  Again, he waits for silence before speaking. “Sergeant Major Sixta wants to be leading Marines on Guadalcanal.  He is a disappointed man.”

Brad could think of a few _other_ choice adjectives to describe this Sixta, but he manages to bite his tongue.  Watching Rudy make coffee is like watching some kind of fucking tea ceremony.  Each step in the process seems to take his full attention. Brad doesn’t want to interrupt. It’s…well, it’s surprisingly soothing.  In the stillness, he notices the trees outside the window.  There is a breeze;  when it blows a certain way ( _south,_ says the little pilot always on duty in his head, _from the south_ ), Brad can hear the faint sound of women’s voices in the distance.

By the time Rudy hands him the tin mug of coffee, Brad has begun to think he will get through the next hour without wrecking anything. Not anything important, anyway.

“Aren’t you going to have any?”  he asks Rudy.

“Oh, I think coffee is a stimulant that pollutes the body and clouds the mind,” Rudy says cheerfully.  “But you just enjoy that while I get the morning shift sorted out. I’ll have Pappy get the LC to brief you about what he wants done.  Given that you’ve been traveling all night, I’m sure he’ll see fit to send you back to the hostel after that.”

++++

Eventually, Brad will realize that the speed with which Meesh had produced orders and a train ticket were not as miraculous as they had first seemed.  (Well, getting a train ticket in two days—that _was_ a minor miracle, and how he’d passed Brad off as a British interpreter will forever remain a mystery shrouded in the fog of war).  Orders to Berlin were a dime a dozen:  the Soviets had taken the city in May and the other Allies were now eager to populate it with their own soldiers and diplomats, lest possession become nine-tenths of the law.   Until Eisenhower unfucked himself and decided who and how to send soldiers to fight that _other_ pesky war, the one against Imperial Japan, regular battalions were simply left in the field.  Specialists like Brad—pilots without planes, doctors without hospitals, engineers without bridges to build—might as well be dispatched to make up numbers in Berlin.  It was what Sixta would call “creating a creditable display of force.”

Brad’s contribution to holding Berlin for the forces of democracy involves looking through lists of names and lists of birthdates and lists of Nazi Party registrations and try to find matches. Any matches should be logged on yet another list.  It is part of a larger process with a long, official name, which everyone refers to as denatzification

“You get a lot of opportunists,” rasps the head of the division, a lieutenant colonel, his voice wrecked by phosgene gas during the _last_ war to end war. He leads Brad over to a desk piled high with files. “Say you’re….I don’t know, a streetsweeper in Neukölln.  Nazis come to power in ‘33, decree that only party members are allowed to hold municipal jobs.  That’s you out on your ass.  You hold out for a few years, but they have a Depression over here, too.  So in 1935, you sign a goddamn membership certificate, all of a sudden, you’re a fucking Nazi _sanitation engineer_ , sweeping streets in Neukölln.  Guys like that, they go in this pile,”  he gestures to a wire tray, barely visible beneath the papers.  “And then you have guys who joined the party in 1929, worked their way up, torched the Reichstag, beat up the Communists, killed the Jews, prayed to Hitler before going to bed every night.  The believers.  They go over here,”  Godfather points to another tray. “The opportunists’ll get scheduled for denatzification interviews, once the Brits send us more translators.  Lucky ones get cleared, go back to sweeping streets.”

“That’s…” Brad looks for the word.  “Magnanimous.”

Godfather shrugs.  “They’re no threat anymore.  Small fish, and fish go where the food is—right now, the Allies have all the breadcrumbs.  Besides, ‘nother month and we’ll all be in the South Pacific.  Somebody’s gotta stay behind to clean up.”

“What about the believers?“  Brad asks.

“Believers get interviewed by another division.”  Godfather’s tone makes it clear that is a division is well over Brad’s paygrade.

“So…no breadcrumbs?”

Godfather glares at Brad like he suspects he’s being made fun of. “These are fucking sharks we’re talking about here, son: a little blood in the water and they’re more’n happy to prey on the weak,” he snarls. “For all I care, they can fucking starve.”

++++

After he's dismissed by Godfather, Brad gets the dime tour from Pappy.  Three floors of the hotel-turned-headquarters contain denatzification offices;  the top floor has been turned into a hostel for enlisted men.  The canteen is in the basement.  The moment he's free, Brad registers himself with the housing officer, dumps his kit on the assigned bunk, and starts asking around about Allied Hospital No. 2.  There’s no hot water at the hostel after 8:00 AM, so he washes his hands, his face, the back of his neck, shaves cold.    He gets another pencil-sketch map from someone who thinks he knows the hospital—“another hotel, nicer than this one, by that big statue…”—and Rudy finds a dispatch courier who is going as far as the Soviet Sector.

In five minutes, Brad realizes he’s wasted his war flying fucking planes.  Imagine, all that time spent with navigators and bombing crews and parachutists, when could have been driving a motorcycle: speed and solutide.  The courier zips through empty streets, dodging piles of stones, trailing his own cloud of dust and debris.  They stop only once, for a convoy of trucks.

The Soviet sector seems to begin in the middle of a street, where one bedraggled sentry next to a larger-than-life picture of Josef Stalin checks Brad’s ID before returning to argue with the courier.  Brad unfolds his handdrawn map, walks east for a few minutes, and promptly realizes that he is hopelessly lost amidst the rubble.   He tries to walk back to the sentry post, but only finds himself more confused.  Usually, he has an impeccable sense of direction, but everything looks the same—broken—and, Christ, he is _just so tired._ Finally, he thinks he’s almost gotten back on track when suddenly, twenty yards away, two women step through a doorway onto the street.

“Hey!”  Brad calls, and they immediately go still.

He jogs up to them: two women, one with gray hair, the other perhaps ten years younger,  both wearing uniform canteen smocks over faded flowered dresses, and Brad waves them down

They look at him, stolidly,  and—shit! Brad had a landlady who spoke some German once, but he can’t remember:  does the question word come first?  and aren’t there at least two ways to say _to_?  _“Krankenhaus?_ ” he manages, finally

“You bombed the hospital,”  the younger woman snaps.  She recognizes his USAAF uniform and Brad is so relieved to hear English that it takes him a moment to register the words.  “Yeah, well, _you_ invaded Poland,” is what he wants to say, but he bites his tongue and thinks strategically.  Trading insults on the sidewalk is not mission effective:  it will not get him what he wants.  What he wants is Nate

Wordlessly, he holds out Nate’s postcard so they can see the return address.  Something flickers in the fierce younger woman’s face, and Brad wonders if she recognizes the card, if she’s ever received a note from someone _injured and in military hospital_ , far from home.

The women discuss something in German for a moment, consulting, before returning their attention to him.  Brad finds a stubby pencil in one pocket and they amend the sketched map. Apparently, he had somehow walked right out of the Soviet sector, into section of Berlin held by the French.  Moreover, the young corporal who had drawn his first map would be lucky to find his own nose with a fucking compass.

“ _Merci.  Danke_. No, no, keep it,”  Brad says when the younger woman tries to return the pencil.  She looks as though she’d like to stab him with it, but she tucks it into a pocket instead.  He tips his hat; he has what he came for—he can be magnanimous in his victory.

++++

Allied Hospital No. 2 is in the Soviet sector because it is staffed primarily by Soviet doctors, all of whom look malnourished and about ten minutes from complete collapse. Brad stands in the front entrance, holding out Nate’s postcard, and repeating, “Excuse me,  _pardonnez_ , _bitte_ —looking for die Englander?”  to anyone who walks past until finally a small dark woman in an apron takes him by the hand and leads him to what was once the hotel’s grand ballroom

Brad focuses intently on the scarf the woman has tied over her hair as she leads him between rows of beds to the far corner.  He doesn’t look to the left or the right, doesn’t take his eyes from the scarf until the woman ducks between two sheets that have been strung up like curtains around a bed in the far corner. When comes out, she has one finger against her lips: the universal sign for _quiet._

Nate is asleep, tucked tightly into the hospital bed and Brad literally has to clench his hands into fists to keep from running them over the blankets to feel the limbs beneath.  In the dim light filtering through the curtains, Brad thinks he can make out feet—two feet, attached to two legs, hips, shoulders, arms, hands—one clutching the blanket and one tucked against Nate’s chin, on the side opposite the swath of bandages that cut across his sleeping face.  The Russian nurse is trying to mime something to Brad, covering her eyes, then blinking rapidly and looking at him quizzically.  Brad nods distantly, though he hasn’t the slightest idea what she is trying to tell him, until she shrugs and slips back out through the sheet curtains.

Nate is injured, Brad reminds himself.  Nate is injured, but he is clean, in tidy striped pajamas and a sterile hospital bed, whereas Brad himself is filthy from traveling across a wartorn nation.  His clothing is dusty, mudstained (the goddamn Jeep had stalled.  Twice), sooty from the train.  His fucking _skin_ feels crumpled. This single fact is the only thing that keeps him from climbing into the narrow hospital bed, boots and all, to put his face against that place above the striped pajama collar, where Nate’s shoulder meets his neck, where Brad could feel his pulse, warm and steady and alive.

++++

The hungry child from the train platform has taken Brad by the hand.  She leads him through the aisles, between the beds, but the far wall of the hospital is gone, bombed out.  He tries to stop her, to explain that it’s not safe, but he doesn’t know the words in German and she is so strong.  Her feet are on the very edge of the torn floor, one more step and she will pull them both over, into the open air and—Nate.  When Brad opens his eyes, he sees Nate, smiling fondly down at him.

“I guess you got my postcard,” Nate looks vaguely piratical with a bandage over one eye.  That’s when Brad realizes that he is not dead.  He’d simply fallen asleep, stretched flat on the floor beside Nate’s bed.  Brad sits up, still disoriented and hazy with exhaustion.  He hasn’t seen Nate in weeks.  Nate had signed his postcard _Sincerely._ Brad doesn’t quite know where that leaves them.  But while he is trying to smooth out the worst of his uniform, Nate leans over the edge of the bed, still flushed warm with sleep.  The kiss is sweet and perfect.

++++

“The sky fell in.” Nate smiles grimly.  “That’s not a metaphor.  The roof collapsed: there was...they called it _"undiscovered structural damage from nearby bombing"_ ,”  Brad remembers Nate’s tiny office in a rococo plaster confection in Weisbaden, recalls a demolition team at work nearby.  “Took them ten hours to dig us out.  If I hadn’t been so close to the ‘Platz, they might never have found me. ”  There is no chair in this tiny space between the wall and the curtains—Nate hasn’t had any visitors—so  Brad makes do by perching on the edge of the mattress when his knees start to feel weak

“Got off quite easily, really,” Nate tries for cheerfulness.  “Bashed my ankle, dust in my eyes—bit of grit scratched the cornea.  Couldn’t see at all for a while, but I’m on the mend now.  Rest and darkness, they said. Thus, the…”  he waves vaguely at the threadbare sheets that block out the rest of the patients and most of the light.  “Apparently there’s a Russian surgeon who specializes in just that sort of thing.  That’s how I’m here—spot of luck, that.”

Brad believes you make your own luck. He opens his mouth to ask what makes Nate so very valuable to the British, so important that they would ship him all the way across the country and beg favors from the Soviets.  But he doesn’t say anything:  he doesn’t want Nate to have to lie. Not yet.

Nate changes the subject, as though he knew the direction of Brad’s thoughts. “The British sector sent over a visiting sister—she’s quite a force to be reckoned with, and she took it into her head that I ought to contact someone.  She was going to get the legation to send word to the girls, to Em and Louisa.  So I convinced her to let me sent the postcard to you instead.”  Nate twists the button on his cuff, looking away.  “I hope it wasn’t a bother.  I’m sorry if I worried you.”

“I wasn’t—” Brad begins, automatically, but of course…he had been.  Worried.   Terrified, actually, when he’d gotten the postcard, when he’d realized what the unfamiliar handwriting must have meant.  He looks at Nate’s hand, fiddling with the fabric, and then wraps his own around it.  Nate’s fingers are cold.  “I’m glad—I mean, not…that—I’m glad you sent me the postcard, glad you let me know.”

“ _I_ was worried,”  Nate says, finally, dropping back onto the pillow.  He’s face is tilted away, his uncovered eye focused on the wall.  “They brought in sappers from a Welsh unit to dig us out.  I shouted until I lost my voice—I was coughing blood when they finally got me.  And then—and then, I could hear them, the sappers,… it sounded like when we used to go to Carnarvonshire on holiday…and finally I could feel the sun and the air and…”  his voice gets very small.  “And I was still in the dark.”

Brad doesn’t know what to say.  He can’t think of a single thing to lessen the primal fear of being buried alive and then left, blind and alone, in a foreign country.   He just laces his fingers through Nate’s and holds on

“I’ll bring you paper,”  he promises, latching on the first thing he can think of. “Real paper—I have a job at Information HQ—none of that field services shit.  So you can write your sisters before they get anything official. I’ll bring you anything, whatever you want.  What do you want?”

“Nothing,”  Nate’s expression is so trusting, Brad wants to kiss it off him.  He might, except that the thin sheet curtains flutter perilously every time one of the hospital staff comes anywhere near.  “I don’t need a thing.  I’m perfectly all right.”

Brad smiles, too, at Nate’s confidence.  Christ, he looks so _young_ , lying here in those ridiculous pajamas.  A Soviet field hospital is lucky to have even these sorry-ass sheets; the pajamas must be Nate’s own, brought to Berlin from Weisbaden and, before that, from Tangmere.  “That’s the spirit that built the Empire, sir.  Churchill would be pleased.”

“No, really!” Nate insists, “I mean, here we are—here _you_ are.  Look, you’re Jewish, and American, and _here you are_ , in the Soviet sector of the former Nazi capital.  But you feel safe, right?”

"Right now, I feel absolutely safe.”

“See,” Nate smiles contentedly, “it’s all relative.”

++++

Allied Field Hospital No. 2 has no regular visiting hours because, of course, it has no regular visitors, just a revolving stream of Red Cross observers and random medical staff borrowed or stolen from other divisions.  Brad comes whenever he can get transport to the Russian sector.  He likes to dodge the sparse, overworked staff, slipping through the ward like a ninja.  Usually, Nate notices him right away, but twice he arrives to find Nate still at work, frowning crossly at the notepad Brad brought him. It’s endearing—Nate squinting, tongue between his teeth, painstakingly forming letters despite his impaired depth perception.  It’s also maddening, because he flatly refuses to let Brad write anything for him.

“It not that they’re anything _private,_ ” Nate explains, almost blushing,  “I mean—it’s letters to my sisters, you’ve met them!  Only, they’d worry if the handwriting didn’t match."

“I think _this_ handwriting will worry them,” Brad surveys Nate’s latest envelope.  “Looks like something _Ray_ might produce.  If he weren’t an illiterate mongrel from an unlettered backwater, that is.”  What he means is that the writing seems to take a lot out of Nate.  Several times during Brad’s visit, Nate’s good eye droops shut

“Sorry, it’s just…I’m still listening, but I’ve got to close my eyes for a moment—”  Nate apologizes

“I can go,” Brad shifts immediately, “if you need to rest,  I can go mail these, come back another time.”

“No!”  Nate reaches to catch his sleeve.  “No, really.  I just need to rest for a few minutes.  Stay,  please—I mean, if you don’t have to go.  You could even just...keep talking?"

So Brad does.  He tells Nate about Information HQ, about Sixta and the LC.  He starts to explain about the denatzification files, but Nate says, quietly, “you probably shouldn’t say too much about that.”  So Brad describes Pappy and Rudy and complains about the food at the canteen.  Pappy is a sniper; he’d landed on Normandy and walked across most of Northern Europe.  He’s shot people from a proximity that Brad, used to the anonymity of an airplane, literally cannot imagine.  But he doesn’t talk about it much (“We all had jobs to do,” Pappy says, quietly, “that was mine.”).  People with skin the color of Rudy’s don’t have forward-line jobs in the U.S. Army, so he’d been worked in various supply depots. Brad thinks this is a grievous misuse of matériel:  he met Rudy less than a week ago, but he knows a warrior when he sees one.  Rudy's been filling requisition forms and making generals’ coffee while fucking Trombley had been crashing planes and falling into trees.  It has occurred to Brad that the U.S. of A. had better get that shit squared away; it would be a shame for the whole country to go down over Rudy’s coffee.

Eventually, Brad meets Nate’s primary doctor, a Russian with a cossack’s mustache who relays medical information to Nate in the only language they share—Latin. He also meets the British visiting nurse, the first Englishwoman to arrive in Berlin after it was liberated.  She seems to imagine herself a modern-day Florence Nightingale, on missions of mercy to servicemen stranded in non-British hospitals.  She also thinks Nate should eat more and avoid straining his eyes.  Brad is in agreement with all of this, so he quite enjoys making the acquaintance of Nurse Spencer.

“Nonsense,” she sniffs when Nate tries to explain that boredom is driving him out of his gourd.  “Your young friend can read to you.”  She gestures to Brad, who nods piously.  “Or you can dictate letters to him.  And as for independent ambulation…out of the question!  This hospital is simply not equipped for it until your vision is improved. You mustn’t undo all the progress you’ve made.”

Nate waits until she’s sailed out on a breeze of starch before he calls her a frightful old battle-axe.

“Why, Nate, what an ungentlemanly comment,” Brad remarks, straight-faced.  “And after that angel of mercy came all this way to make sure you’re not being mistreated by the Russian savages.”  It’s a bad time to make a joke.

“Doctor Polinovsky is _not_ a savage!  Any more than I’m an invalid.  And it’s preposterous to think that just because I tripped over that medicine trolley—once, _once!—_ I should be confined to bed forever!”  Brad is about to mention the ugly trolley-shaped bruise blooming on Nate’s forearm when he sees Nate’s good eye go glassy with tears of frustration

“Hey,”  Brad begins, clumsily,  “It’s nothing to cr…don’t…”  but Nate burrows into the pillow, rolling away to face the wall

Again, Brad doesn’t know quite what to do.  He remembers the impotent annoyance he’d felt at Tangmere: stuck with the Lightly Wounded, betrayed by his body, useless, unable to do what he’d been trained for.  And at least he’d had a window to look out of.  He puts a hand on Nate’s back, but the Englishman shrugs him off, tugging the blankets savagely around his shoulders.

Brad sinks back onto his make-shift chair, an upturned fire-bucket from the days when the hospital had been a hotel.  Tucked neatly under the bed is a kitbag with whatever possessions Nate had been sent with from Weisbaden.  In the outside pocket there is the copy of _Grapes of Wrath_ that Brad had liberated from the Tangmere pub and given to Nate as his very first Christmas present.  For lack of anything better, Brad opens it—the pages feel luxurious after years of rationed paper—and he begins to read aloud.

He reads until, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nate’s shoulders relax.  He reads until he hears Nate’s breathing go deep and even.

++++

When Brad returns to the hospital, two days later,  both of Nate’s eyes are bandaged. “Migraine.  Brought on by eye-strain—too much fine work in bad light,” Nate says tightly.  “It seems I owe Nurse Spencer an apology.”

He does not apologize to Brad, but he does ask him to read another chapter

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine…just read quietly.  I’m prone to them,”  Nate sounds disgusted with himself.  “You should’ve seen me right before my tripos at university.”  Brad wonders if Nate knows that the doctor’s chart, posted to the wall over his bed, says nothing about migraines.  The older notes are from the Weisbaden clearing station, nearly illegible medical chickenscratch ( _something cranial concussion, fracture left something x2, ocular something something_ ), but the most recent ones were transcribed by Nurse Spencer.  At the bottom of the list, in precise girls’ school copperplate: “Compounded Nervous Exhaustion.”  Which sounds accurate enough to Brad:  Nate had probably been under-fed and over-worked even before his building had collapsed on him.

When Nate falls asleep, Brad writes his own letters—the first in four months—sitting in the dim half-light.  He write to Ray, to Ginny, to his mother.

After about a week, Information HQ gets a new batch of denatzification folders and Brad can’t get away for a few days.  When he does make it back to the hospital, the dressing has been removed from Nate’s eyes and replaced by a pair of round, steel spectacles

“What do you think?”  Nate asks, excitedly.  He is sitting up in bed, surrounded by pages from old _Stars and Stripes,_ evidently eager to try out his new and improved vision. “Aunt Agatha’s going to have a fit!  She always was sure that the military would ruin my looks."

Brad doesn’t think the glasses have ruined anything—but he’s not about to say so.  “Well, I hate to side with your aunt, but you know what they say about men making passes at girls who—”  Nate crumples up a sheet of newsprint and hurls it at Brad

“Glasses certainly haven’t harmed your aim, sir.”

“You’d do well to remember that, Sergeant.”

++++

Brad gives Nate two days to get used to his new glasses before swapping Rudy for a day off and launching his mission.  Provisions for the expedition include C-rations from the Information HQ canteen and his own spare uniform shirt.  Brad peeks through the curtains, looking over the long line of sleeping bodies in the torpid ward.  “C’mon,” he says, feeling rather like a movie gangster, “time to blow this joint."

Nate looks up at him, his gaze somehow more somber because of the glasses, and then snaps into action.  He moves quickly and efficiently;  he does not ask questions.  His pajama shirt is already half over his head by the time Brad politely turns his back to keep watch.

A look-out is not strictly necessary: Brad’s not sure anyone would bother to stop them even if they noticed.   Allied Hospital No. Two is obscenely understaffed, so most of Nate’s ward—head injuries, Brad guesses, since several patients seem to be unconscious—are left to their own devices.  Occasionally, a doctor or an orderly will walk through, but for the most part, medical intervention seems to involve the healing properties of a quiet bed and twice-daily servings of potato soup. However, someone somewhere has made Nate’s case a priority, so the rules may be different for him.   If Nurse Spencer chooses today to make one of her flying inspections, they’re screwed.

Brad’s situational awareness is hyper-tuned.  He is keenly aware of Nate behind him, dressing.  He lets his eyes drift closed for a moment to focus on the soft sound of bedsheets and clothing, the _chink_ of a belt buckle, the whisper of a tie.  He hasn’t touched Nate since that first kiss, twelve long days ago. Not the way he _wants_ to touch him.  But he’s imagined, at night in his narrow hostel bunk, and he’s watched, especially since the bandages have come off, leaving Nate looking dazed and _fuckable_ in those stupid schoolboy pajamas.

Brad startles, eye snapping open, when Nate brushes his shoulder.  “All right,” Nate’s breath is hot on the back of Brad’s neck.  “Let’s go.”

++++

Out of the ballroom, down what used to be the hotel’s main staircase, right through reception, and onto the street.  No one stops them.  No one even looks twice, despite the fact that Nate is wearing a British tie over a shirt with American shoulderboards and that the whole look is topped off by Soviet glasses.  “You’re like a walking League of Nations,”  Brad remarks, but Nate is not listening.  He is standing in the gutter, head turned up toward the sun, like he’s absorbing the light through every pore.  He heaves a sigh of contentment so wanton that Brad’s eyes cross a little.

“Lead on,”  Nate says at last.  The glasses are standard Soviet issue, old-fashioned compared to GI S9s.  They are a little loose on Nate’s thin face, and he’s developed the endearing habit of nudging them up the bridge of his nose.

“Well,”  Brad realizes he’s been staring,  “there seems to be a farm or a park or something up that way.  Thought we could have a picnic.”

As they walk uphill from the hospital, the bomb damage gets worse.  Brad has forgotten that this is actually the first time Nate has _seen_ the city.  He walks slowly, studying the wreckage. A group of women are salvaging bricks from a smashed building.  Berlin is a city of women now—children evacuated, men killed or captured.  Women and soldiers.  It hasn’t always been a good mix, but Brad suspects the women will outlast the Allies. He remembers the fierce woman who had given him directions to the hospital on his first day.  He thinks Berlin will need more people like that.

When they reach the shadow of a tumbledown triumphal arch that once crowned the hill, Nate stops to touch what used to be a mural on one of the walls: rows of cracked and peeling paint soldiers march off into broken plaster

“I forgot the book,” Brad says, just to distract Nate.  “You could’ve read to me while we eat.  After all, it’s your turn."

“Don’t need a book,” Nate says distantly, looking down at the destruction they’ve walked through.  “ _The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold…like the leaves of the forest when summer is green, that host with their banners at sunset were seen. Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown, that host on the morrow lay withered and sown.”_

Brad realizes that he’s staring again.  Nate shrugs.  “‘The Destruction of Sennacherib,’ by Byron. It’s a poem about a mighty army that is struck down for its offenses against God.”  He turns away from the fallen buildings and sets off across a raggedy field.

Brad catches up. “And—what, you have it memorized?”

Nate nods, casually, and rattles off another stanza.  He laughs at Brad’s amazement, his mood breaking.  “I’ve got reams of poetry off by heart.  My mother thought it was the ‘mark of an educated mind,’ so my father used to give me sixpence for every piece I learned, to please her.” Now they are walking over scrubby grass, dodging patchy vegetable plots.  He jumps into a rapid-fire recitation as they cross a hummocky path…something about a boy on a burning ship.  “And now, Em’s favorite, _The Lady of Shalott_ :  _On either side the river lie…._ ”

Brad whacks him gently with the bag of canteen rations. “Latin and poetry and warfare.  Your brain must be a ridiculous place.”

“A well-furnished place,”  Nate corrects.  “Everything to hand.  Never know when you’ll need—“  He shuts up when Brad kisses him.  Kisses back.  “Careful.  Mind the potatoes!  And potential spectators.  Look, let’s go up beyond those linden.”

Brad tugs him over the next rise, beyond a scrim of twisted trees, so he can spread out his greatcoat in the waist-high grass without offending anyone’s vegetable plot. “There, how’s that?  All clear on the potato front?”

“What can I say. I’m a farmer…sworn to protect all root vegetables.”  Nate slings himself onto the improvised picnic blanket.

“You’re an intelligence operative,” Brad informs him, sitting down.  “You’re a fucking war hero. Who happens to know about potatoes and—what the hell is linden anyway?  A tree?"

Nate rolls his eyes—Brad’s forgotten how much he missed that—and then closes them against the sun.  The coat is too small for him to lay down, so he puts his head in Brad’s lap. “All I ever _wanted_ to be was a farmer.”  He yawns.  “Maybe a farmer who writes books,” he amends, thoughtfully. “I like books.”

++++

They lay in the sun, silent for a moment.  “According to the Official Secrets Act, if anyone asks, I’m supposed to say I work in _government communications,”_ Nate’s eyes snap open suddenly.  “I guess they figure that’s dull enough that no one will ever ask for more.  So that’s what I am: I’m an Official Secret. And I know about the linden because I’ve been here before.”

“Where?  Berlin?” Brad waits until Nate’s eyes have drifted closed again before he settles back on his elbows.

“Yes.  But here, to this park, the Tiergarten.  Before it was all chopped down for firewood. I was here once—oh, it must have been eight years ago, almost.”  Nate smiles to himself.  “I was supposed to be in Greece.”

“In _Greece_?  What—did you take a wrong turn?  At the _Alps_?!”

Nate tries to swat at Brad, but the angle is bad: he barely cuffs Brad’s shoulder.  He works his hand back across Brad’s chest by feel, stopping to undo his collar button

“I was supposed to be going to work on my Greek—modern and ancient, me and three schoolmates and a crammer.  Richard and I were to meet up with the others, but there was some problem with the trains,” Nate’s voice is sleepy, like he doesn’t care whether the story gets told or not, but his fingers are quick.  He’s already started pulling at Brad’s tie. “We must’ve been going through Italy.  There are always problems with the Italian trains.”  Nate makes a small, satisfied sound when his thumb finally settles into the hollow at the base of Brad’s throat: skin contact at last.   “So we came to Berlin instead.”

“Oh?  Why?” Brad’s voice isn’t working right, it comes out low and husky.  “What was in Berlin?”

“Mmmm…” Nate hums thoughtfully, a sound Brad can feel in his chest.  And then he turns, _curling_ over Brad, interlocking them so his right knee settles between Brad’s legs with Brad’s thigh is between Nate's. Nate is leaning over him, straddling his hip, and looking down with innocent green eyes.  “Boys, if I recall correctly."

++++

Nate laughs at the noise Brad makes, and then gasps when Brad’s hips roll up against him.  Brad works a hand under Nate’s shirt, which is really Brad’s, which means Nate smell like Brad.  “Everything,” Nate manages between kisses, hot, open-mouthed kisses that trail across Brad’s jaw and down his throat, “everything you’ve heard?—about Berlin—between the wars?”  He’s undone enough of Brad’s uniform blouse to bite his shoulder.   “All true.”

Brad blinks.  Now it’s his turn to play innocent.  “I come from a nation of Puritans.”  He runs his palm along Nate’s side, over his ribs, warm damp skin, just to hear the way it makes Nate’s breath catch and whine.  “I have no idea what went on in Berlin before the war."

“Let me—can I show you?”  Nate pants between kisses, not playing now: asking, wanting.  He is flushed all the way down to his nipples (which Brad recalls are rather sensitive—he arches up, licks, sucks, like Nate’s a fucking girl, and a pleading whimper suggests that memory serves quite well). Nate makes a sound that might be “please”—and who is Brad to say no? Nate has always had beautiful manners.

Nate’s mouth follows his fingers, down Brad’s neck, down his chest, like he’s learning all of Brad’s reactions all over again.  He undoes buttons, plucks away clothing, tugs at Brad’s hips, _arranging_ him, so he can mouth and touch and bite.

“Bossy,” Brad grunts.

“Sorry, what was that?”  Nate nips Brad’s thigh, teeth as sharp as his eyes.

“ _Said_ you’re kind of bo—oh…oh, _God_.”  Brad nearly jack-knifes off the ground, held in place only by Nate’s palms, flat and hot on his stomach.   He looks down his own body to see that Nate has swallowed him down completely.  Brad can _feel_ Nate’s throat flutter and close as he fights to relax; when he opens his eyes, there is just a thin green ring around enormous pupils.  It’s only then that Brad realizes Nate is still wearing those goddamn glasses.

Gradually, Nate works his way back up Brad’s cock, until his swollen lips are pursed just around the head.  Then he pulls off.  Instinctively, Brad’s whole body tries to follow, wanting more. Nate’s breath on his body is warmer than August.

“You can touch, if you want,” Nate says, his voice ragged, before he takes Brad back into his mouth, achingly slow now, gliding down to where his fingers cup Brad’s balls.  Brad manages to untangle his own fingers from where they are fisted in the long grass. When he brings them up to tentatively touch Nate’s sun-warm hair, to cradle his head, Nate groans so deeply Brad can feel the vibration in his hips.  He means to be careful, gentle, but now Nate is teasing: tonguing quickly, suckling hard and deep.  Long fingers roll Brad’s balls, slipping behind.  When Brad finally unravels completely—oh, shit, that _tongue_ —he’s got two of Nate’s fingers in him and he’s whispering _fuckfuckfuck_ on every breath.  At the last minute, Nate’s free hand slides off Brad’s hip and up to his jaw, thumb finding its way between Brad’s teeth, like after all this time Nate remembers that Brad can be a little (a lot) loud, how Brad likes to come with something in his mouth.

++++

Brad’s eye close with the force of his pleasure, and when he opens them, he is sun-blind for a moment.  Then, Nate rises up, cheeks pink and eyes glassy.  He says something that Brad can’t make out over the throbbing of his own pulse. “Urghk,”  Brad manages.

Nate spits into the grass and kisses Brad’s bare knee.  “That’s precisely the response I was hoping for.”

Words—words are not…how does Nate have any words?  Brad...Brad has no words.  So he simply pulls Nate down to possess that beautiful and obscene mouth. Nate is hard, leaking hard, his breath catching when Brad moves against him.  Brad is going to do something about that, yes, but Nate comes all over Brad’s stomach—a sudden full-body spasm and a wide-eyed little  “ _oh!”_ —as soon as Brad slips a shaky hand on the small of his back.  He tumbles onto Brad, trembling.

When Brad regains enough motor control, he slides his fingers under the wings of Nate’s glasses and removes them gently.  He kisses Nate’s closed eyes, feeling the butterfly tickle of his eyelashes, and then lets Nate slump back onto his shoulder.  He listens to the sound of the breeze through the dry grass, to Nate’s breathing as it settles.  He closes his eyes against the sun, he’s drifting toward sleep when he remembers…

“Hey, so—Richard?”

“North Africa,”  Nate mutters into Brad’s neck. “His sister told me it was quick, painless.  That's what the War Office wrote in the telegram, anyway.  Must be true.”  
  
Brad knows the War Office writes that in _every_ telegram.  Nate knows, too.

“Oh…I, Christ, Na—”

Nate shakes his head, ducking the words, burrowing against Brad’s chest.  “ _The time you won your town the race_ ,” he interrupts, still so close that Brad feels his tongue on every ‘t’, “ _we chaired you through the market-place. Man and boy stood cheering by, and home we brought you shoulder-high.  Today, the road all runners come, shoulder-high we bring you home. And set you at your threshold down, townsman of a stiller town_.”  When he pauses for a breath, Brad knows not to say anything.  “That’s A.E. Housman.  ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.’”  Another pause.  “ _Smart lad, to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay.”_

Brad lets the afternoon go back to the summertime quiet: there is no traffic in Berlin, no children playing, no women gossiping.  It’s an unnatural quiet—Brad doesn’t trust a place with no birds in the trees.  _A stiller town._ He realizes his fingers have been carding meditatively through Nate’s hair.  It’s grown out a bit since he’s been in hospital.  Sixta would have a conniption.  And he comes to a decision: “I’m going to get a motorcycle.  After the war.”

After a second, Nate snorts.  “A motorbike?  Will I sound too much like your mother if I say you’ll fall and break your head?”

“I’ve never said that before.”

“That I sound like your mother?”

“No— _after the war_.  Never even thought it.  I don’t know, it seemed like…tempting fate.  And,”  Brad bites Nate’s ear, “I would endorse leaving my mother out of this conversation, since we’re half-naked in a goddamn field.”

Nate turns until his eyes meet Brad’s.  “You are going to survive this war,” he declares firmly, like saying makes it so.  “You _have_ survived this war.”

Brad’s heart twists at the certainty in Nate’s voice.  “Oh, I am assured of that.  And now I have big plans.”

Nate’s mouth twitches.  “Motorbike?”

“Among other things.”  Brad wrestles his uniform into some semblance of order.  They can’t get up to much in a field fifteen minutes from the Brandenburger Tor, but they certainly make do.  “Now, put on your goddamn Russian commie glasses before I accidentally break them and cause an international incident.”

Nate smirks, but obeys.  He shrugs his borrowed shirt over shoulders already pink with sunburn and offers Brad his handkerchief to clean up, just like a gentleman. Behind him, Brad can see the blue sky and broken domes of Berlin.  The war is not over, he thinks, but it is over here.  And if he has bad dreams, Nate will wake him.  There are no safe places, but there are relatively safe places.  “Tell me another poem?”

Nate settles his head on Brad’s stomach, unconsciously adjusting his glasses.  “ ‘Tell Me the Truth about Love,’” he announces.  “Ever read W.H. Auden?  I think he lives in America now, but he visited here, in Berlin, before the war— _When it comes, will it come without warning, just as I’m picking my nose?  Will it knock on my door in the morning?  Or tread in the bus on my toes?  Will it come like a change in the weather?  Will its greeting be courteous or rough?  Will it alter my life altogether?...”_

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this sequel for Thady, who helped me out on a school project and asked for something in this 'verse. Epigraph is by Richard Fein. Google "field service postcard"...they were a real thing!


End file.
